[REVIEWS] Beach Slang – The Things we do to Find People Who Feel Like us – Polyvinyl Records (2015)

« I hope you dream bigger tonight.

I hope you act on it.

I hope it all happens. »

James Alex has a way to write that makes all the songs he writes feel like a big crushing one. As much as it can be soft ⎯ and feels most certainly alive ⎯ it is still a beaten nihilist voice of an entire generation who dreams as big as it can while having a completely lost hope flowing in its veins. Out of place, spoiled to the point of missing drugs and stranger to the system it is supposed to contribute. We ⎯ through his Waitsy voice ⎯ are living but missing everything we hope this world could be. When we achieve life as THEY want, we destroy the one we want. When we achieve life as WE want, we get marginalized and beaten up on those filthy streets and walls that they put there for us to stay ⎯ and suffer.

Beach Slang’s new album shows all the nuances of living in a world that can be ours as much as it can’t be ⎯ yet. It’s the universal slang of the unfulfilled. Of the ones who shares a vision of a better world through alcoholic beverages and crushing fists, only waiting for the world to let them be who they really want to.

More than a prisoner’s scream, The Things we do to Find People Who Feel Like us, is an elixir to our awaken mind. We’re not alone and we can share moments of lucidity with the hope of eventually ⎯ really ⎯ living. It’s short and the speech is more or less the same through it all, just like our lives.

Listen to it over and over, share who you really are with the world and ⎯ please ⎯ crush all the conformity with your differences and your bitterness. Feel alive, so we can eventually have the world we need.